There will be no battered copies of Dan Brown or Dick Francis in the beach bag of Barack Obama as he relaxes at Martha's Vineyard this week – or at least none that he's admitting to. Instead, the US president has packed a mix of historical biography and environmental calls to arms for his holiday reading – with a little light relief included courtesy of crime novelist George Pelecanos.

Obama started his week-long holiday with his family on the Massachusetts island on Sunday. The weightier end of his holiday reading is filled by Thomas L Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded – subtitled Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How It Can Renew America – and Pulitzer prize-winner David McCullough's biography of the second US president, John Adams, which stretches to over 700 pages.

But the leader of the free world won't only be tussling with non-fiction: he's also packed three novels, including Pelecanos's The Way Home, a Washington DC-set thriller about a son trying to turn his life around as he works for his father, who stumbles upon the ill-begotten gains of a jewellery heist. Lush Life by Richard Price meanwhile is the story of an apparently random shooting on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Like Pelecanos, Price has written HBO's much acclaimed Baltimore crime drama The Wire.

Obama's collection of five books is rounded out by Kent Haruf's National Book Award-nominated Plainsong, about the members of a small Colorado community, from a pregnant high school girl to two boys abandoned by their mother.

Publishers of the five titles will be watching their sales with interest: the "Obama effect" saw sales of Joseph O'Neill's cricketing novel Netherland soar after the US president mentioned he was reading it, while merely being handed a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez made an unlikely

bestseller of the 1973 work.

Details of the president's holiday reading were released at an official press briefing, which additionally disclosed that Obama's leisure plans also include a round or two of golf and some tennis with the first lady.